Melanie Feinberg

Instructor:

Melanie Feinberg

School:

University of Texas at Austin

Semester:

Spring 2014

Description:

Conceptually, this iteration of 385U is an inquiry into the unknown. Together, as a community of scholar-designers, we will investigate how the notion of residuality, or the experience of being insufficiently described via a classification system, can be actively enacted as part of an information collection’s descriptive infrastructure (metadata). Our exploration focuses on three questions:

How can a digital collection foreground the experience of the residual?

What constitutes the authoring experience of such a digital collection?

What constitutes the reading experience of such a digital collection?

Structurally, this course combines seminar-style, focused discussions of readings with project-based elements of a design studio. We will use activities of critically interrogating experimental designs, making our own designs, and reflecting back on our process and product to generate insight into our foundational questions. Our design practice will be grounded in the idea that a collection is both a form of expression and a form of experience, shaped by the designer, or author, but brought into being by user (or audience, or reader) interactions with the collection’s resources.

Practically, the ideas we engage and the skills we will learn should be applicable to any sort of collection. However, our design environment for this course will focus on digital media collections (specifically videos) made available online as a type of digital library.

Instructor:

Melanie Feinberg

School:

University of Texas at Austin

Semester:

Spring 2014

Description:

Introduction to general principles and features of organizing and providing access to information, including varieties and numbers of information-bearing objects, different traditions of practice, user concerns, metadata and metadata formats, document representation and description, subject access, and information system features and evaluation.

This course provides a general introduction to the organization of information, concentrating on the core operations of describing, grouping, arranging, and relating objects. While the course will focus most heavily on the organization of documents, or bibliographic information, the objects most commonly organized in libraries and archives, we will not be unduly concerned with particular implementations for any specific institution. In other words, you will not learn traditional library cataloging or archival description in this class. You will, however, learn the principles that form the basis for all such systems. Accordingly, the assignments for the course emphasize the application of organization principles in desigining mechanisms for organizing information.

Instructor:

Melanie Feinberg

School:

University of Texas at Austin

Semester:

Fall 2014

Description:

This course comprises a critical, comparative examination of the concept of description and its institutionalization, in the form of metadata standards, rules, and formats, in three primary contexts: libraries, archives, and museums. We will investigate the conceptual foundations and goals of description in each context and the structures (guidelines, technologies) that have been developed to facilitate institutional goals.

We will also explore emerging challenges to traditional models of description, focusing on potential convergence of descriptive efforts in digital environments. We will examine initiatives to create integrative infrastructures across cultural heritage environments, and we will ponder the incorporation of “data” in cultural heritage collections as well as “documents.” We will also think about the nature of description (that is, metadata) and the status of traditional distinctions between description and its object (that is, between metadata and data, or metadata and document).

The course will not emphasize the practice of creating descriptive metadata in any current environment (that is, you will not learn how to create library catalog records or archival finding aids according to existing content and technical standards). Instead, the course will focus on understanding and interrogating the conceptual foundations of existing standards and guidelines for such descriptions. We will emphasize rigorous and spirited analysis of these descriptive paradigms and their continued utility in a rapidly changing information landscape.

Instructor:

Melanie Feinberg

School:

University of Texas at Austin

Semester:

Fall 2014

Description:

Perspectives on Information. A multi-disciplinary and historical examination of information as a primary and foundational concept. Contrasts key literature from information studies with perspectives from other fields.